Ride
At first, there was nothing. A blank landscape. Mountains with no discernible features, nothing to show you there was anything special at all about them. And then she swung. An old, ratty, tire swing, it took the girl wearing a gradient washed jean jacket and boots up to her calves around. Up and down, it swung her. Her beauty-queen style wavy hair flowed with the slight wind, though maybe that was just from the motion of the swing itself. As it went, swinging, back-and-forth, she leaned back, feeling the air rush around her. She closed her eyes, becoming one with everything. One with the air, one with the ratty swing, one with the undescernible mountains. And she began to think. I was in the winter of my life, ''she thought. ''And the men I met along the road were my only summer. She thought back on this, imagining it as she said it. The men -- the bikers who had sometimes picked her up alongside the road. The bearded men, who had no roots anywhere. The men who always wore bandannas, the only thing they knew they would have with them when they woke up the next morning. The free men. That night, I fell asleep with visions of myself, dancing and laughing and crying with them. She imagined all these moments from the beautiful scrapbook of memories she had put together over the years. The countless motels, the endless landscapes just like the one she swung on now. The different souls she met along the way. The souls who knew what it meant to truly live, not just to be alive. The ones who knew the next day they might never be able to find the place they had called home the night before. ''3 years being down the line on an endless world tour and memories of them were the only things that sustained me, and my only real happy times. '' She pictured those years before her life was so grounded. She pictured herself on the back of a motorcycle with a man whose name she couldn't remember, just throwing her head back because that was the only way to express her true elation. ''I was a singer, not a very popular one, who once had dreams of becoming a beautiful poet--'' She remembered that first night, missing her boys on the road. She remembered how she looked in her one-shouldered white cashmere top when she finished her set and made her way to the nearest drug store, looking for anything that might remind her of her true home, the home where there is no home. ''--but upon an unfortunate series of events saw those dreams dashed and divided like a million stars in the night sky that I wished on over and over again, sparkling and broken. '' She remembered the way she walked out of the drug store with a simple orange soda, failing to find anything but too confused and embarassed to leave it empty-handed. ''But I didn't really mind because I knew it takes getting everything you ever wanted and then losing it to know what true freedom is. When the people I used to know found out what I had been doing, how I had been living, they all asked me why. But there's no use in talking to people who have a home, they have no idea what it's like to seek safety in other people, for home to be wherever you lied your head. '' She remembered the way she had walked into the alley and opened the soda, figuring she might as well drink it. She thought about how much she missed the men whose names were such a blur to her now. And more than anything, she wanted to hop into every stranger's car that drove by and tell them to drive her away until they were again on the open road. But she couldn't do that now. Those days were over. ''I was always an unusual girl. My mother told me I had a chameleon soul. No moral compass pointing due North, no fixed personality. Just an inner indecisiveness that was as wide and wavering as the ocean. And if I said I didn't plan for it to turn out this way, I'd be lying. '' But then it did happen. If only for one more time, the next car pulled over to the alley and a man she didn't know started talking to her. She found a new soul, if only for that night. But that's exactly what she was used to. ''Because I was born to be the other woman, who belonged to no one, who belonged to everyone. Who had nothing, who wanted everything with a fire for every experience and an obsession for freedom that terrified me to the point that I couldn't even talk about, that pushed me to a nomadic point of madness that both dazzled and dizzied me. '' She remembered how it felt to step onto the stage for the first time, thinking then about the same moments she thought about now. Of the bikers on the road. Of the man in the car. Of every time she felt everything she didn't feel that moment she stepped onto the stage for the first time. Of every time she felt free.